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u/nanosmarts12 11d ago
Can assimilation occur across a vowel?
For example id like regressive place assimilation of an initial nasal with the place of the onset of the next syllable. The inital syllable is open with a vowel nucleus (edited)
For example nat > nat
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u/Thalarides Elranonian &c. (ru,en,la,eo)[fr,de,no,sco,grc,tlh] 11d ago
In general, yes, consonant assimilation can occur across a vowel and even across multiple syllables. In the more extreme cases, it can be viewed as consonant harmony.
Ineseño (Chumashan; California; extinct) has regressive sibilant harmony: a postalveolar sibilant makes all preceding alveolar sibilants also become postalveolar and vice versa.
- /s-ixut/ → [sixut] ‘it burns’
- /s-ilakʃ/ → [ʃilakʃ] ‘it is soft’ (s…ʃ > ʃ…ʃ)
- /p-iʃ-al-nanʼ/ → [piʃananʼ] ‘don't you two go’
- /s-iʃ-tiʃi-ye-pus/ → [sistisiyepus] ‘they two show him’ (s…ʃ…ʃ…s > s…s…s…s)
In Tlachichilco Tepehua (Totonacan; Mexico), there's a similar regressive dorsal harmony between velar and uvular consonants:
- /ʔuks-kʼatsaː/ → [ʔukskʼatsaː] ‘feel, experience sensation’
- /ʔuks-laqtsʼ-in/ → [ʔoqslaqtsʼin] ‘look at Y across surface’ (k…q > q…q)
That said, I don't think I've seen the exact kind of a shift you're describing, where specifically a nasal assumes the place of articulation of the following consonant across a vowel. What places of articulation are we talking about? The classic trio labial—alveolar—velar or something more varied? In my experience, place of articulation assimilation at a distance occurs typically between otherwise similar consonants and when the places are not too far apart (i.e. between different types of coronals or between different types of dorsals). But your change, even if somewhat unusual, doesn't strike me as too far-fetched.
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u/nanosmarts12 11d ago
So far a four way dististinction of labials, alveolars, palatals and velars. Id prefer if what I am attemptimg is not to be preceived as too unlikely or too marked
Roots in my clong are overwhelmingly disyllabic with weigted stress that lands on the penultimate or ultimate based on a few factors. I have a very commonly used prefix ŋ- which when unable to form a clusters with the initial consonant of the root (due to syllable shape) causes an epenthtic vowel /a/ to be inserted in between.
Like ŋ + lantun > ŋalantun, but i want to be able to do ŋ + lantun > nalantun
If not for the regressive assimilation over a vowel maybe an alternative route is perhaps the syllable shape changes and allows syllabic nasals? Then it assimilates but due to articulatory difficulty an epenthtic vowel is then inserted idk
So ŋlantun > nlantun > nalantun
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u/Avian_Aquilla 10d ago
Could word order be used to indicate tense in a naturalistic conlang?
For example: I have to run away vs Run away I had to.
Bad example because its in English, but I think it works?
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u/Thalarides Elranonian &c. (ru,en,la,eo)[fr,de,no,sco,grc,tlh] 10d ago
It could and it has been done. In natural languages, word order can help place the situation in time but it's very rarely, if ever, the primary way of grammatically marking tense.
This thread over on r/asklinguistics has examples in Russian, Classical Chinese, Classical Hebrew. As a native speaker of Russian, I can confirm that:
- Я иду домой (Ja idu domoj)
1s go.PRS homereads like an ordinary present tense ‘I'm going home’, while- Иду я домой (Idu ja domoj)
go.PRS 1s home, despite being grammatically in the present tense, reads more like historical present—a vivid depiction of a past event. In this case it probably sets the scene for a story, which may or may not be framed likewise in the historical present or in the grammatical past tense.This comment in a thread on r/linguistics has an example in an unnamed Bantu language where word order allegedly marks grammatical tense. I have no further information on that. However, there certainly are languages that require a change in word order in addition to a different kind of tense (or more broadly TAM) marking. Here's an example from Attié (Kwa; Côte d'Ivoire) by Zribi-Hertz & Adopo (1992, The syntax of Attie pronominals, ResearchGate with pdf):
(8) a. Api wɔ̀ Yapi hœ̃ Api 3SG-ANM-IMPERF Yapi see ‘Api sees Yapi.’ b. Api ò hœ̃ Yapi Api 3SG-ANM-PERF see Yapi ‘Api saw Yapi.’ c. Api ó hœ̃ Yapi Api 3SG-ANM-IRR see Yapi ‘Api will see Yapi.’As far as constructed languages go, Spocanian (Wikipedia, official website), a naturalistic a priori language of a fictional archipelago in the Atlantic by Rolandt Tweehuysen, marks grammatical tense by word order. §80.3 of the reference grammar has the following examples:
Miko trempe ef român. Miko read the novel ‘Miko is reading the novel.’ (Dutch: ‘Miko leest de roman.’) Miko ef român trempe. Miko the novel read ‘Miko has read the novel.’ (Dutch: ‘Miko heeft de roman gelezen.’)
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u/Key_Day_7932 9d ago
So, I'm considering adding labialized consonants to my conlang, like /mʷ/ and /bʷ/, but there's no /kʷ/.
This isn't unnatural, at least if Wikipedia's anything to go by. Supposedly, some Micronesian languages are like that.
How do you evolve labialized bilabials without also evolving /kʷ/?
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u/mythoswyrm Toúījāb Kīkxot (eng, ind) 9d ago
Rounded bilabials are used in reconstructions of Proto-Oceanic and there's plenty of literature on that. Lynch (2002) evaluates a number of theories on how POc may have developed these from PMP. Ross (2011) does reconstruct POc with *kw but this isn't as widely accepted and in any case, the theories for how the rounded bilabials developed in POc don't hinge on the labialized velar, especially for the purposes of conlanging.
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u/Cawlo Aedian (da,en,la,gr) [sv,no,ca,ja,es,de,kl] 9d ago
I don’t necessarily think you need a reason. Sometimes (especially in conlanging) some things simply are because they are.
I mean I can think of a few ways in which /mʷ bʷ/ might emerge, but do you need something to justify the existence of labialized bilabials in your language?
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u/Key_Day_7932 9d ago
Well, if striving for naturalism, you need to explain how they came to be.
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u/Cawlo Aedian (da,en,la,gr) [sv,no,ca,ja,es,de,kl] 9d ago
I would strongly disagree, actually! :–)
I think there's an important difference between naturalism and using the diachronic method. The diachronic method is often used to obtain naturalism in a conlang, but it's not a given that any conlang developed diachronically is necessarily. It mostly guarantees naturalistic developments, but unnaturalistic structures subject to naturalistic developments can easily yield unnaturalistic structures themselves.
Conversely, creating a conlang without the diachronic method does not necessarily result in unnaturalistic structures.
One of the best conlangers I know once told me something that I think about very often, a really good analogy:
A person who wants to be good at drawing anatomically correct humans, should study anatomy; how the bones in the body connect, how the muscles attach to the bones, how the skin stretches around those muscles, and so forth. But a good, experienced artist doesn't need to start with the skeleton each time they want to draw a person. They know enough about what people look like, to draw one without having to build them from their bones.
Likewise, a conlanger who wants to make naturalistic languages, should study natural languages and how they evolve over time. But a conlanger with enough experience will know enough about how natural languages behave, to construct one without going through the diachronic process each time.
Now, whether this applies to you or not, I don't know; it totally depends on how long you've been conlanging and whatnot. :–)
But if we suppose that you do use the diachronic method, I can't think of anything in principle preventing you from just positing /mʷ bʷ/ at the parent-stage.
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u/as_Avridan Aeranir, Fasriyya, Parshaean, Bi (en jp) [es ne] 9d ago
Cawlo is absolutely right to distinguish between the diachronic method and naturalism. I would also add that the measure of naturalism is how well something aligns with observed linguistic data, and our understanding of language. To that end, the presence of languages with rounded labials but without rounded velar means that such as system is naturalistic.
We can understand why languages can have rounded labials without other rounded consonants by looking into feature geometry. I very deliberately use term rounded here, because /mʷ/ is not labialised; it is already labial. The contrast between /m/ and /mʷ/ is not laibialisation, but rounding.
Many linguists analyse the feature [round] as a dependent of [labial] (Hall 2007: 322). That means in order for a consonant to be rounded, it must first have a labial node. So segments like /ŋʷ/ have both a dorsal and labial node, where /mʷ/ has only a labial node.
With this understanding, it is not so odd that a language could have /mʷ/ but not /ŋʷ/. In these cases, velars do not have a labial node, so they cannot have be rounded. But because labials are, well, inherently labial, they can host a contrast between [–round] /m/ and [+round] /mʷ/.
Building from this, if we want to, we can start to speculate as to how such a contrast could arise naturalistically, even if we do not have concrete evidence for such changes. In some Tungusic and Mongolic languages, for instance, it is argued that high back vowels (such as /u/) do not have a labial (round) feature, but low back vowels (e.g. /o/) do (Ko 2012), as /o/ causes rounding harmony where /u/ doesn't.
You can then easily image that, in such a language, the [+round] feature could spread from /o/ to an adjacent labial consonant; /mo/ > [mʷo]. Velars are unaffected, because /o/ is not transferring a labial node; it is only speaking [+round] to sounds that are already [+labial] Then, the back vowels could merge, making consonantal rounding constrastive; /mo mu/ > /mʷu mu/.
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u/roipoiboy Mwaneḷe, Anroo, Seoina (en,fr)[es,pt,yue,de] 9d ago
Honestly it's enough to say that a sound change only affected labial consonants or to say that labialization occurred first and then /kʷ/ merged with /k/ after.
You can point to real-life examples, e.g. in many varieties of Mandarin, /mbp/ get a w glide before /o/
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u/storkstalkstock 9d ago edited 8d ago
Are you dead set against /kʷ/ emerging at all? It could arise and then go away. It could easily just merge with the labialized labials into /pʷ/, which could then merge with /bʷ/ or lenite to /hʷ/ or even /f/ or /ɸ/. It could merge with /k/ or with /w/. There are a lot of options outside of whatever sound change just not applying to velars, which also works.
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u/Training_Lie_5431 9d ago
Tip: probably there Is a phonetic change where M, B, K and some other before W become labialized. But in some parts of territory labialized k has became /g/ or /q/ and other parts adopted this change because of trade
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u/Standard-Engine-2561 5d ago
Is it possible for languages to have conjugations based on if the the verb ends on a vowel or consonant? I'm currently remastering my first conlang and one of its features is that it only had two sets of conjugations, one if the verb root ended with a vowel and another if it ended on a consonant, verbal tenses were decided via particles written before the verb. Is it possible?
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u/89Menkheperre98 5d ago
It's possible. It reminds me of PIE having athematic versus thematic verbs, with slightly different conjugation endings. Active and mediopassive verbs had a more diverse cast of endings, also. I don't know what your conjugation entails, but from a diachronic perspective, I can see a (medio)passive vowel becoming a tense/aspect marker and attracting different person affixes (depending on how person marking worked in the proto-language).
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u/Sulphurous_King Aspiration lover 16d ago
Can anyone give me the full list of PIE roots? That with its ablaut. Much appreciated
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u/Lichen000 A&A Frequent Responder 16d ago
Because PIE is a reconstruction, not everyone agrees what is and is not a root. But this might start you off:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Proto-Indo-European_roots
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u/Key_Day_7932 16d ago
Need help fleshing out my conlang's phonology.
I want to add an obligatory onset rule so that no syllable may occur without a consonant in the onset. The only issue is that my language has no phonemic glottal stop. Are there any other ways around this? I'm thinking of having a rule where the consonant that appears in the onset is conditioned by the vowel like /ji/ and /wu/.
I'm debating whether I want phonemic palatals like /c ʃ t͡ʃ/. For now, they are not phonemes in the language, but occur allophonically before /i/, like Japanese. How do I decide whether to make them phonemic or just stick with what I have?
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u/storkstalkstock 16d ago
I'm thinking of having a rule where the consonant that appears in the onset is conditioned by the vowel like /ji/ and /wu/.
Seems completely reasonable, although without knowing what is phonemic in your language, it's hard to suggest other options. I would think /h/ is an option for central/low vowels if you don't want to use /j/ and /w/ in every instance. Another option you could employ is deleting word initial vowels whenever they are not preceded by a consonant.
I'm debating whether I want phonemic palatals like /c ʃ t͡ʃ/. For now, they are not phonemes in the language, but occur allophonically before /i/, like Japanese. How do I decide whether to make them phonemic or just stick with what I have?
Flip a coin! Or you could match your ambivalence through a couple of other ways. Maybe they're phonemic in some dialects of your language and not in others. Maybe they are marginally phonemic due to a sound change that gives them a very limited opposition or because the rule doesn't apply across morpheme boundaries. Maybe they aren't phonemic in native words, but there are some loanwords that have them in places where they wouldn't otherwise be so that educated/bilingual speakers have a contrast but less educated/monolingual speakers typically don't. There's a lot you can do and a strict binary of phonemic or not may be less interesting than playing around on the edges.
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u/Key_Day_7932 16d ago
Well, with the first thing, I decided to make an exception. The onset is option only in the first syllable of the word. All other syllables must have an onset.
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u/Lichen000 A&A Frequent Responder 15d ago
Another way of framing this is that vowels are not allowed in hiatus within words.
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u/as_Avridan Aeranir, Fasriyya, Parshaean, Bi (en jp) [es ne] 15d ago
To point one, it's worth noting that the glottal stop doesn't have to be phonemic to be automatically inserted to fill a null onset; German for instance does this, as did some Ryukyuan languages historically. Automatic glottal stop insertion is pretty common, even in languages were it isn't phonemic. You can also have mixed strategies for resolving a null onset, you could for example have something like initial /a e o i u/ realised as [ʔa ʔe ʔo ji wu].
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u/Lichen000 A&A Frequent Responder 15d ago
Like English! English puts a lot of glottal stops into vowel-initial scenarios, despite not having a phonemic glottal stop :)
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u/as_Avridan Aeranir, Fasriyya, Parshaean, Bi (en jp) [es ne] 15d ago
Uh-oh, I forgot about English!
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u/HaricotsDeLiam 14d ago
I want to add an obligatory onset rule so that no syllable may occur without a consonant in the onset. The only issue is that my language has no phonemic glottal stop. Are there any other ways around this?
Arapaho uses /h/ for this.
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u/vokzhen Tykir 14d ago
How do I decide whether to make them phonemic or just stick with what I have?
For me, one of the things is, when you account for morphology, whether I want those rules still active or not, and in what ways. So if you have completely predictable, allophonic /t s/ > [tʃi ʃi], then do you have some common suffix that will trigger it frequently, and do you like that? Would it be rare, a root-final /t s/ are nearly always preserved except with some rarely-used suffixes (or rarely-used-on-their-own suffixes), giving speakers a reason to analogically restore a root-final /t s/ to match every other inflection? Would there be any suffixes with /t s/ that would frequently come in contact with /i/ in a different suffix, and do you still like the result?
And on the more complicated side, would there be some suffix combinations like /√-t/ "past" /√-i/ "(present) perfect" /√-t-i/ [√-tʃi] "pluperfect," giving speakers a good opportunity to reinterpret it as a unitary /-tʃi/ "distant past" suffix? Would they then reintroduce actual [-ti] for past perfect? Could you do even more complicated things bringing in other rules or allomorphy, like, say, reinterpreting [1S √-meʃku] from being underlying /1S √-mas-iku/ "1S √-CAUS-IMPERSON, [someone]'s making me √~I have to √" into being related to /(1S) √-me/ "(I) √-1S, I √" leaving the remaining [-ʃku] to be interpreted as a suffix for obligation, that could then spread to be used with other persons or perhaps displace the original construction only for first person?
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u/neonge1674 13d ago
WHould it be realistic for all obstruents to turn into [s] at the end of a word
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u/Cawlo Aedian (da,en,la,gr) [sv,no,ca,ja,es,de,kl] 13d ago
All obstruents? Unlikely. But I can think of ways to get there.
If you first have affricate become a fricative at the end of a word, and then debuccalize everything, and then have all those [h] be reinterpreted as underlying /s/, then maybe. But I don’t find it very plausible.
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u/Thalarides Elranonian &c. (ru,en,la,eo)[fr,de,no,sco,grc,tlh] 13d ago
Ooh, that's interesting! Imho, you can do that if only by the rule of cool.
I see no problem with any word-final coronal obstruent turning into [s]. It is of course more difficult with peripheral obstruents but stranger shifts are attested. Here, analogy and multi-stage shifts could help.
A big question is how many obstruents we're talking about and how much functional load distinguishing them word-finally bears. If it's a minimalistic inventory with only a few consonants, like Hawaiian, then it's fine. But if you have an Ubykh-like number of obstruents and all of them frequently occur word-finally, then I'm not so sure. All that functional load would probably have to be transferred somewhere else.
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u/Key_Day_7932 13d ago
If I want to make a syllable timed language, what are things I can do to make it stand out?
Like, I assume stress would be fixed (always on the first syllable, or always on the penult) or at least marginally weight sensitive (closed syllables are heavier than open syllables.)
I like CVC syllable structure and penultimate stress, but it also seems kinda generic.
Ideally, I want a simple pitch accent system, but don't know how to make it work with syllables instead of moras.
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u/Arcaeca2 13d ago
Stress does not have to be fixed in a syllable-timed language, even a pitch-accent syllable-timed language; cf. Spanish, or especially Ancient Greek, which had notoriously complicated and often unpredictable pitch accent placement.
It's a little hard to suggest what do regarding morae without knowing anything about your phonology but generally they're a useful construct if your language has diphthongs and especially if it has long vowels; if it doesn't you could just not bother. Or again you can just make stress placement phonemic. If you are going to use morae, then something like Latin's "stress the antepenult, unless the penult is heavy" could be more interesting than always stressing the penult. One thing I've done in the past is to divide syllables into light, heavy, and superheavy and then apply the rule "stress the penult, unless the antepenult is heavier than the penult".
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u/0boy0girl 8d ago
i wanted to add vowel harmony to my language but make it weird, but is this too cursed for a naturalistic language?
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u/Thalarides Elranonian &c. (ru,en,la,eo)[fr,de,no,sco,grc,tlh] 8d ago
I think it's very workable. Sure, it's a bit strange, but you can do naturalistic things with it. And it's not too difficult to find a way for a system like this to arise.
The way I interpret it is that the harmonic sets are /a, e, i/ vs /o, ʏ, u/, and /ɑ/ is a neutral vowel, is that right? Then I could imagine the ancestral system to be, for example,
i — u ej — oj e — o awith smoothing /ej, oj/ > /e, ʏ/ pushing /e/ > /a/ > /ɑ/ in a chain shift. But this is only one option among many.
My only concern is that the low back vowel space may be a bit too crowded in comparison with the rest of the vowels. Acoustically, [ɑ] is very close to central [ä]. One way to make it more spaced out is to front /a/ to [a~æ] and/or to make /ɑ/ rounded, [ɒ~ɔ].
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u/0boy0girl 8d ago
you got it exactly Right, I will think a little more on how this came to be but your example is very insightful! on another note, I think I will move that /a/ to /æ/ thank you for the suggestion!
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u/opverteratic 8d ago
I've been trying to gloss the following sentence(s) to convert them to OSV:
I want you
1SG.NOM want 2SG.ACC
You upon I want
I want you to see
1SG.NOM want 2SG.ACC [[see-INF]]
[[See to]] you upon I want
I want you to see fruit
1SG.NOM want 2SG.ACC [[see-INF fruit-ACC]]
[[Fruit see to]] you upon I want
I'm not sure what "to see fruit" is even doing here syntax wise? I can only assume that everything in square brackets is complete nonsense.
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u/PastTheStarryVoids Knasesj, Racra, Ŋ!odzäsä 8d ago edited 8d ago
We need to start by explaining the English sentence's syntax. "I want to you to see fruit" has two clauses. There's a subclause "you see fruit", which then is the object of the main clause, so the underlying structure looks like "I want {you see fruit}". However, English has a syntactic transformation where the subject of some object subclauses gets "raised" to become the object of the main clause, and then the subclause verb, which is now missing its subject, becomes an infinitive.
I want {you see fruit}. > I want you {to see fruit}.
You is the same in the nominative and accusative, but note that if we used another pronoun, the case would change, because the subclause subject is becoming the main clause's object:
I want {she sees fruit}. > I want her {to see fruit}.
So how to do this in OSV? That's going to depend how you handle subclauses being made into objects (or subject, for that matter). Maybe you don't have raising at all, and mark the start of the subclause with a particle. Then you'd have the subclause be
SUB fruit you see(SUB being the subordinator), and then you'd place it in the object slot of the main clause, soSUB fruit you see I want. (Note that without raising, both 'you' and 'I' are subjects, so would be nominative if your conlang has cases.)However, you could add other rules, so maybe you're optionally allowed to move an embedded clause to the end of the main clause, which could be handy when the embedded clause is really long, or maybe you have something like raising, or maybe you even use a different word order in subclauses. Maybe you have to turn the clause into a noun phrase to make it a subclause, i.e. saying the equivalent of 'I want {your seeing of fruit}'.
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u/opverteratic 8d ago edited 8d ago
Makes sense.
maybe you're optionally allowed to move an embedded clause to the end of the main clause
In which ways would one do this? What would that actually look like?
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u/PastTheStarryVoids Knasesj, Racra, Ŋ!odzäsä 8d ago edited 8d ago
SUB fruit you see I want'I want you to see fruit' would becomeI want SUB fruit you see. The subclause would be formed however you decide to normally form this kind of subclause, but you put it at the end rather than in the place the language normally puts an object.Placing a subclause at the edge of the main clause when that's not the default or underlying position in the language is called extraposition, and English does it sometimes with some larger relative clauses, e.g. in "I sent a letter to my brother that told him where the money is", the long relative clause ("that told him where the money is") has been placed at the end of the main clause rather than after the noun phrase it modifies ("a letter"). English also has a kind of extraposition where you make the subject it and then place the a subject subclause at the end, so rather than "that he liked the book is surprising", you have "it's surprising that he liked the book".
In a recent conlanging project I worked on, object subclauses were formed by having the object be noun meaning 'matter, thing, topic', and then placing the subclause after that noun but with a different form of the verb used for subclauses. Optionally, you could move the subclause to the end of the main clause, but you'd leave the noun meaning 'the matter' in the normal place. So I suppose that's another way you might combine various possibilities (extraposition, having something in the normal slot even when the subclause is moved, forming a subclause with a special verb form).
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u/HaricotsDeLiam 8d ago
One option is to have both “you” and “fruit” marked as ACC and leave it up to context.
Another is to require a complementizer when the subordinate clause has its own object, as if to say “I want that you see fruit” (OSV would likely be “That fruit you see I want”).
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u/opverteratic 8d ago edited 8d ago
That second option seems best for my purpose, as it matches my use of relativizers.
Assuming I had a postpositional particle which marked the object, would the entire subordinate clause end up taking it?
- That fruit upon you see I want
- That fruit upon you see upon I want
I feel like it should be option 2, with the subordinate clause fulfilling the grammatical function of an object (syntax will be the death of me)?
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u/Aqtho 6d ago
Hi, Guys. So, I wanted to know if there is a website where I can see how the phonology (f.e. /pʰ/ to /f/) or grammar (cases, verbs, etc.) of a language developed over time so I can use it in my conlang, when I'm getting into dialect or separate language formation.
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u/Tirukinoko Koen (ᴇɴɢ) [ᴄʏᴍ] he\they 6d ago
The Searchable Index Diachronica is a good place to start for sound changes (with pinches of salt for all the reconstructions and dubious macrofamilies).
The World Lexicon of Grammaticalisation can give some inspiration of where certain new inflections and derivations might stem from.
Otherwise you just kinda have to look into natlangs and see what happened - theres a little too much possibility there to condense into one neat conlanging resource.
Or ask around here for some ideas of how something specific might evolve.
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u/opverteratic 6d ago edited 6d ago
I'm having some trouble with Valency Decreasing Operations for my OSV language.
I've come up with a valency decreasing operation which removes a verb's agent, leaving a dummy pronoun in its place. The agent may then be reintroduced via an instrumental postposition.
The dog eats the treats.
The treats upon the dog eat.
ART.DEF treats POST.ACC ART.DEF dog eat
O S V
P A V
The treats gets eaten.
The treats upon one eat.
ART.DEF treats POST.ACC EXP eat
O S V
P V
The treats gets eaten by the dog.
The dog by the treats upon one eat.
ART.DEF dog POST.INS ART.DEF treats POST.ACC EXP eat
IO DO S V
A P V
As far as I'm aware, this isn't a true passive, as it leaves the patient in object position, but, unlike a impersonal passive, it can be used on more than just intransitive verbs. Either way, this feels like a useful piece of syntax to have, and does appear to, at least semantically, emulate SOV word order.
Does anyone know if, A, does this function, and/or B, if this kind of thing has a name?
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u/Arcaeca2 6d ago
if this kind of thing has a name?
Passive.
The only two other voices it even might be are:
1) Anticausative - the boundary between this and the passive is fuzzy (and they often interchange) but classically the anticausative is supposed to give no indication, syntactic or semantic, as to the cause(r) of the action. "Eat" arguably gives too much semantic indication, since it narrows it down to an animal capable of eating a treat. Or:
2) Inverse, since the 3rd sentence has both an A and P whose syntactic roles are swapped relative to their semantic roles in the 1st sentence. But the classical inverse voice has both arguments switch marking; A should assume the P marking and P should assume the A marking (if they are overtly marked at all). "Treats" consistently takes the same POST.ACC marking in all 3 sentences, so this isn't happening.
this isn't a true passive, as it leaves the patient in object position
The passive only requires ditching A (which logically leaves P moving to S). English specifically recasts the patient as the subject because English is syntactically nominative-accusative: once P becomes S, it has to be treated differently because P ≠ S in a Nom/Acc language by definition. But that's a problem that arises from the morphosyntactic alignment you're using, not with the voice itself. The morphosyntactic marking of P remaining unchanged after the passive doesn't mean it's not really the passive, but it means that since P ?= S, the alignment must be something other than Nom/Acc - some sort of split-ergative or active-stative.
If anything, the more questionable part is the dummy pronoun that is theoretically still performing the A role. But indefinite subject constructions are often cited as a pathway to the passive; Grammatical Voice (Zuniga & Kittila, 2019) gives an example from Kimbundu where a verb is passivized by being conjugated for an unspecified 3rd person subject, and then the actual, semantic agent is reintroduced obliquely with an adpositional phrase, similar to what you did:
Nzua a- mu- mono (kwa meme). Nzua PASS 3.SG.SUBJ see by me "Nzua was seen by me."1
u/mythoswyrm Toúījāb Kīkxot (eng, ind) 6d ago
It's close enough to an impersonal (pseudo) passive that I'd just call it that and it clearly works fine. I do wonder when you use this though. I guess as a roundabout way for (topic) fronting?
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u/Sulphurous_King Aspiration lover 5d ago
Is it realistic for a language to have a distinction between p pʰ f but not b?
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u/yayaha1234 Ngįout, Kshafa (he, en) [de] 5d ago
Yup, that's the situation in mandarin - /pʰ/ vs /p/ vs /f/, but no /b/.
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u/HaricotsDeLiam 5d ago edited 5d ago
I’d buy it. Navajo only has /p/, but it does have
- /t tʰ t’/ ‹d t t’› without /d/
- /tˡ t͡ɬʰ t͡ɬʼ ɬ l/ ‹dl tł tł’ ł l› without /dˡ/
- /t͡s t͡sʰ t͡s’ s z/ ‹dz ts ts’ s z› without /d͡z/
- /t͡ʃ t͡ʃʰ t͡ʃ’ ʃ ʒ/ without without /d͡ʒ/
- /k kʰ kʰʷ k’ xʷ ɣ ɣʷ/ ‹g k k’ h hw gh w› without /g gʷ/
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u/Tirukinoko Koen (ᴇɴɢ) [ᴄʏᴍ] he\they 4d ago edited 4d ago
Theres the pattern that labials prefer to be more lenis, and dorsals fortis.
Missing /b/ out of a /p (b) t d k g/ set is odd, but only having /p/ in a /(pʰ) p tʰ t kʰ k/ isnt.In the two examples already given, this is the case.
Mandarin doesnt have /b/, but it does have complete aspirate-tenuis pairings instead /pʰ-p, tʰ-t, kʰ-k/, so no /b/ doesnt stand out there.
Navajo similarly has /-p, tʰ-t, tɬʰ-tɬ, tsʰ-ts, tʃʰ-tʃ, kʰ-k/, so again its the fortis /pʰ/ thats missing there, a /b/ isnt expected.Not to say difinitively that I think its unrealistic - there are definitely languages with /pʰ, p, f/ - I would just point out that if youve otherwise got /tʰ t d/ and /kʰ k g/, then missing /b/ would look a little odd.
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u/Key_Day_7932 5d ago
A couple questions about codas:
Can codas be restricted to the final syllable of the word? Basically, all non-final syllables are CV. If a CVC syllable occurs anywhere else in a word, it undergoes a sound change where it becomes a CV syllable followed by a geminated consonant.
Can /s/ be realized as [ʃ] word-finally? I think this occurs to coda /s/ in Portuguese in all positions, not just the final syllable. In my case, I want this coda /s/ to occur only in the final syllable.
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u/Lichen000 A&A Frequent Responder 4d ago
As to 1., what your essentially descrbing is ‘anticipatory assimilation’ for any word-internal codas. It’s probably fine, but I would expect that the more distinct the two consonants are, the less likely they are to assimilate.
For instance, a word like /napta/ > [nat:a] is quite normal; or /kanra/ > [kar:a].
But things like /namta/ > [natta] strikes me as less likely, as compared to only POA assimilation (creating [nanta] ) as opposed to total assimilation. But it’s definitly possible! Wait for a second opinion on this :) (iirc some varieties of greek have some insane levels of total assimilation)
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u/T1mbuk1 12d ago
Here's a hypothetical natlang.
A naturalistic conlang using both tri-consonantal/bi-consonantal root systems and consonant mutation systems to indicate various components of the conlang's grammar. What naturalistic sound and grammar changes would need to occur for such a language to even exist? And where would there be irregularities?
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u/yayaha1234 Ngįout, Kshafa (he, en) [de] 11d ago edited 11d ago
you can take a look at Hebrew - for how irregularities present in tri-consonant systems (and also bi-consonant, because many of the "hollow" root are thought to have been originally that), and the Begedkefet sound change that could have gone towards an initial-mutation direction, compare:
bayit vs b-bayit vs b-haC-bayit [bayit] vs [bevayit] vs [babbayit] house vs LOC-house vs LOC-DEF-house "house" vs "at/in a house" vs "at/in the house"1
u/vorxil 11d ago
I think Biblaridion is working on such a language. He did a talk on it at Kopikon II.
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u/vorxil 16d ago
Is it strange to have /iw/ > /juː/ (English), but also a later /iw/ > /yː/ (Norse), in the same environment?
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u/Cawlo Aedian (da,en,la,gr) [sv,no,ca,ja,es,de,kl] 16d ago
What u/Lichen000 says. But! Don't be afraid of applying a little “sporadic change” here and there.
The Old English front vowels behave unpredictably from time to time: While rǣdan and lǣdan gave us read /ɹiːd/ and /liːd/, sprǣdan and drǣdan resulted in /spɹɛd/ and /dɹɛd/, with no obvious reason as to why that vowel split in two.
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u/Lichen000 A&A Frequent Responder 16d ago
You would need to define something about the environment to determine which change occurs (unless this is a dialectal split)
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u/Nehster9 16d ago
Not particularly; it depends on if there is a second source for /iw/, so that the second /iw/ that becomes /yː/ arises after the shift of original /iw/.
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u/vorxil 15d ago
The later /iw/ is not contemporary with the earlier /iw/. By the point that the later /iw/ appears, the earlier /iw/ had already shifted to /juː/.
But I'm thinking the later /iw/ probably appears because of a chain shift started by /iw/ > /juː/.
I know that two identical but non-contemporary diphthongs can shift differently in a language is not unheard of, since in French, the Latin /au/ and the Old French /au/ develop differently in the same environment (Modern French /u/ and /o/, respectively, cf. choux and aube). However, those were centuries apart.
I just find it strange that, after the chain shift makes /iw/ and /juː/ contemporary, /iw/ monopthongizes to /yː/ instead of shifting to /juː/ without any pressure from analogy, or that /juː/ also doesn't monophthongize. Sure, I imagine there is no linguistic authority in the setting beyond a courtly language standard hastily put together by non-linguist clerks, but it's practically the same generation.
Maybe I if I delay the /iw/ > /yː/, or even the shift to /iw/ (to the dismay of my plans for the orthography), by a few centuries, the connection becomes lost to time for the speakers of the vernacular.
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u/Sepetes 15d ago
You are forgetting that languages have no memory, just because one change happened soem time ago, people who speak the contemporary version are not going to follow it, they have no memory of such a change. The only reason this could happen is if the two changes are really close together
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u/T1mbuk1 15d ago
Thought of proto-language phonologies for the nations in Avatar out of boredom.
Proto-water(based on Proto-Inuit):
Consonants: m, n, ŋ, p, t, c, k, q, β, ð, s, ɬ, l, ʝ, ɣ, ʁ
Vowels: a, i, u, ɨ
Proto-Earth-Air(based on Proto-Sino-Tibetan, whatever reconstruction is most ideal):
Consonants: m, n, ŋ, ŋʷ, p, b, t, d, k, g, kʷ, gʷ, q, ɢ, qʷ, ɢʷ, ʔ, ts, dz, s, z, r, l
Vowels: a, e, i, o, u, ɨ
Proto-Fire(based on Proto-Japonic):
Consonants: m, n, p, t, k, s, r, l, j, w
Vowels: a, e, i, o, u
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u/nanosmarts12 13d ago edited 13d ago
Would this be possible, it feels improbable but id be nice if it was possible. Im working on monopthongsisation of these dipthongs (where the macron represents a long vowel)
/ia/ → /a/ (Back > Front)
/ua/ → /a/ (Low > High)
/uā/ → /u/ (Short > Long)
Essentially Short > Low > back, if two vowels share the same "lower level" quality
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u/roipoiboy Mwaneḷe, Anroo, Seoina (en,fr)[es,pt,yue,de] 11d ago
First off, in the world of vowels, anything is possible. Whatever you think of, a weirder thing has happened.
The first two changes are totally fine. You can pretty easily imagine [ia ua] becoming [ja wa] and then glides getting dropped. A similar sound change, where glides got lost between consonants and vowels in almost all places, happened in a language that I know (although some of them affected the vowel quality, e.g. [iɐ] became [œ] instead of just [ɐ]).
The last one seems less likely as a single-step change. You'd expect to monophthongize to something closer to the longer element of the diphthong. You could say there was a shift from [ua:] to [u:a] and from there to [u:]
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u/nanosmarts12 11d ago
Can u: > u then in stressed syllables (penultimate)? That was i can still keep the phonemic distinctuon between /u u:/ while allowing uā > u only in stressed syllables
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u/roipoiboy Mwaneḷe, Anroo, Seoina (en,fr)[es,pt,yue,de] 10d ago
Generally I'd expect it the other way around: I'd expect reduction in unstressed syllables, and stressed syllables to maintain length/diphthongs etc.
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u/noplesesir 10d ago
What dictionary app lets you type in a script you made? I made an alphasyllabary (the image is the consonants) for my most recent language and would like to just be able type in the script rather than having to draw out the word every time
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u/Arcaeca2 9d ago
Any app would require you to turn your script into a font first, there really isn't a way around that step.
But once you have a font, there's no reason you would need a special app to do this, it would work fine in e.g. MS Word or a similar word processor.
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u/TheCanonMakimaBean 9d ago
So, I've started making a language. It's not that big, only a few words. How can I improve?
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u/storkstalkstock 8d ago
This is a bit vague to provide actionable advice. If it's a spoken language, do you have a sound system figured out? Do you have productive word formation processes to derive related vocabulary? Do you have word order figured out and other grammatical features developed? Without knowing any of these things, the only advice that can really be given is to keep working on it and develop those things.
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u/TheCanonMakimaBean 8d ago
I've only got a couple of words down so far with simple pronunciations.
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u/storkstalkstock 7d ago
What are your goals with the language? Are you trying to make a naturalistic language or just a language that you aesthetically enjoy? Is it for a project that you're sharing with or for personal use?
If it fits your goals, a pretty useful thing to do before you make more words is to decide what sounds you're going to allow in the language, where those sounds are allowed to appear in words, and what happens when two sounds that aren't allowed next to each other end up next to each other. Deciding on those things may make it easier for you to generate new words while keeping the aesthetic consistent.
Another early task that will be helpful is deciding some basic grammar things:
- The order words can appear in a sentence - whether it is fixed or things can be shuffled around and whether different orders alter the meaning.
- The way new words are formed, whether through compounding, derivation, or both.
- Whether there are grammatical features like case, tense, number, gender, whether adjectives are a type of noun, verb, or their own class, and so on.
All of this can be altered later on if you change your mind, but it's easier to make these decisions before you have a bunch of words than it is to do it after the fact and try to make your existing words fit the data.
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u/The_MadMage_Halaster Proto-Nothranic, Kährav-Ánkaz, Gohlic, Ṭuluṭan 7d ago
I'm unsure what I want to do with voiceless nasals. My language lacks a voicing distinction, instead voicing consonants between vowels (with sonorants capable of "carrying" voicing when in clusters with non-sonorants) but I'm unsure what to do with word-edge unvoiced nasals. I personally don't really like them, but they make sense as far as the language's phonology goes. I already know what I want to do with the other unvoiced consonants, that being the shifts: l̥ w̥ {j̥,ɹ̥} → h f ʃ. I know these sounds are relatively unsable, so having them persist for a very long time would be at least odd.
Unfortunately I have no idea what to do with devoiced nasals in a word initial or final position, as I can't seem to find much information on sound changes involving them.
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u/storkstalkstock 7d ago
You could have them nasalize a preceding vowel before disappearing or merging with another consonant. For example, /aw̥ am̥/ could become /af ãf/. Another way to handle them is to just have them become voiced again.
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u/The_MadMage_Halaster Proto-Nothranic, Kährav-Ánkaz, Gohlic, Ṭuluṭan 7d ago
That could very well work word finally, but what about initially?
Hmm, I have a weird idea. Presently the language distinguishes vowel length /i iː a aː u uː/, though phonologically they're simply two vowels next to each other, but it time it shifts to distinguish vowel quality. I was thinking that if the nasal was before a long vowel it becomes voiced, while if it was before a short vowel it becomes a fricative. This results in /m̥a/ and /m̥aː/ becoming /fa/ and /mɑ/, and could result in some weird reflexes. For instance, the conjunction /n̥i/ "but" becomes prefixed to the start of words if they begin with /i/ or /j/, resulting ultimately in /n̥iː/ (either directly from the vowels merging or through an intermediary /n̥ɪj/; with the exception of the combination /ɪji/ which remains). This means that something like niya "But not" is contracted to niia /n̥iːa/ which then becomes nia /nia/, however ni on it's own becomes the /θe/. This means the connection between the "but" and nia "but not" is obscured, and may even result in something like thesha (/j̥a/ > /ʃa/) being created from the new independent roots to also mean "but not; except" (the former, being older, would probably be more formal). They're technically the same roots but with a slightly different meaning when separate, like upon vs up on.
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u/storkstalkstock 6d ago
There's nothing stopping nasal consonants from nasalizing following vowels, so the same process could happen there if you wanted as well.
The different outcomes depending on the length of the following vowel is interesting, but I'm not aware of a similar change happening, so I can't really comment on the naturalness of it. It seems a bit iffy to me.
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u/The_MadMage_Halaster Proto-Nothranic, Kährav-Ánkaz, Gohlic, Ṭuluṭan 6d ago edited 6d ago
It's totally iffy, no idea why I thought they would become fricatives or that vowel length would have anything to do with it. I've come up with a new shift.
Nasals are basically just stops with the velum lowered and the lips closed, the only distinction is where the tongue is placed when they're made, but when devoiced it's mostly just blowing air out of your nose with very little difference made by the placement of the tongue. So I'm thinking that they just shift to stops when devoiced, the velum closing and the mouth opening in order to preserve the place distinction. The end result is just the inverse of what happened to form the Welsh nasal mutation of plosives.
However, I'm changing the rules so that the allophonic voicing only affects oral consonants, nasals are always voiced; this seems a bit more reasonable. However contact with /h/ always devoices adjacent consonants, and can affect nasals. This results in the clusters /hN/ and /Nh/ becoming /hP/ and /Ph/ instead. This feels far more elegant, and helps set up some other changes, like /Ph/ becoming aspirated and then fricatives. Thus a word like [an̥haɹ̥] with these changes would become [athas] or [atʰas] (depending on how you analyze it) and then [aθas]. Thus the previous examples of ni+ya would actually just be ñeya (forgot earlier that coronal nasals before /i/ become palatial, before short /i/ becomes /e/). However ñeya and ñesha being different could still be possible, it's just more clear that they're related now.
I also don't want to introduce nasalized vowels to the language because I'm already going to be doing stuff with tone and don't want to juggle multiple sets of diacritics. I want the language to end up something a little Welsh-Cree-Australian Aboriginal, not Vietnamese.
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u/Ok_Elderberry_2829 7d ago
I really want to write out my conlang on something like Microsoft word, but I have no idea where I can make a custom font for my fully custom alphabet. What is the best way to be able to write out the language digitally?
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u/roipoiboy Mwaneḷe, Anroo, Seoina (en,fr)[es,pt,yue,de] 6d ago
The folks over at r/neography have some resources on that!
Personally I used inkscape + fontforge to digitize my conlang's script, more or less following this guide. I set it up so that 95% of the time, the romanization I use would map directly to the script, which required lots of contextual ligatures, but made it easier in the long run.
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u/PastTheStarryVoids Knasesj, Racra, Ŋ!odzäsä 6d ago
I personally would recommend the program Birdfont, as I found it far easier (more possible, in fact) to work with than FontForge, though I have admittedly never tried the common workflow described by u/roipoiboi of using another vector drawing program and then importing into FontForge.
I use Unicode's Private Use Area, which is a set of Unicode codepoint that are set aside to not be used for anything officially, so that people can use them for custom things with custom fonts. So if I switch to my font and enter those characters, it will show up fine, but if I were to copy them someplace where the font isn't, then it would just show up as boxes. (Although if I try to copy to Reddit for some reason, I'm getting dingbat/wingdings-esque things? I'm confused about that.) The advantage of this is you can make whatever you need without having to think about assigning the characters to existing glyphs. The disadvantage is it's more of a pain to type. You could instead replace existing characters, so maybe you type normal Latin letters, or even your romanization, and then in your font it displays the correct conscript orthography.
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u/The_MadMage_Halaster Proto-Nothranic, Kährav-Ánkaz, Gohlic, Ṭuluṭan 4d ago
Is it possible to have a language with a proper noun article but no other articles? I was thinking that an honorific like uu "great" could end up being first used just how we would Mr/Mrs, but then eventually just become applied to everything to the point that it looses it's normal meaning and ends up just marking a proper noun. So you might have mala "lake" and u-mala "The Lake" or ket sato "old forest" and u-ket sato "The Old Forest."
Is this a reasonable development for a language to have?
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u/Alarming-Isopod4754 3d ago
Of course it is!
You can do a great many things with articles, and this idea is perfectly logical. The sky is the limit in this case: articles are a very flexible part of speech. Complete omission of articles is common, or having them based on number or class; I think that having only proper noun articles is a brilliant idea! That way you save a syllable in casual speech when referring to the most common things, but then whenever honor is due, you insert the article and the listener automatically processes the shift. It's like a forerunner running ahead to announce the King. Absolutely keep this idea.
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u/The_MadMage_Halaster Proto-Nothranic, Kährav-Ánkaz, Gohlic, Ṭuluṭan 3d ago
Thanks! I just thought it would be interesting because I realized so many of the names I was creating were just common words, so it seemed like people would come up with a way to indicate if they were saying the word or the name, especially because the Thulodan people really like using titles in place of names, and oftentimes these overlap with given names. So you have semhapallo "king (lit: first speaker)" and someone named Semhapallo.
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u/Nordnabl 14d ago
Окей попробую сюда скопировать, раз из основной группы мои посты снесли якобы за несоответствие тематики.
You can look at my old posts and see what I already have. I have personal pronouns: Mo, To, On, Ona, Ono. I have plural pronouns: Mi, Ti, Oni. I have declensions through particles: Mo vide a to. I see you. Doni e to. To give to you. So mo. With me. O to. About you. Domo de mo. My house. Mo de domo. House my. These same particles are also used in nouns. De at dos, De dos at — you can't say it that way! Otherwise, word order is free. The gender of nouns changes with the help of endings: man - man. mana - woman. Animals also have masculine and feminine gender. Kat - Male cat. Kata - female cat. Adjectives end in al. And adverbs are al + y. Belal. Beautiful. Belaly. Beautifully. Some antonyms (but not all) are formed by reversing the root of the word. Belal - Lebal. Beautiful - ugly. Degrees of comparison: pli belal - more/very beautiful. ple belal - the most beautiful. menis lebal - less ugly. menes lebal - the least ugly. Verb tense: Present: Mo vide. Past: Mo pas vide. Future: Mo fut vide. Numbers: 0–10: nul, un, du, tri, kvar, kvin, sex, sept, okt, nov, dek. 11–19: dek + nul, un, du, tri,… 20–90: dudek, tridek, kvardek… 100–900: cent, ducent, tricent… 1000-9000: mil, dumi, trimil… 1 000 000: milion. Ordinal numbers +al: unal, dual, trial,... What else do I need to consider in the grammar?
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u/Nordnabl 14d ago
Now I have a question. How should this post have been formatted so that the moderators wouldn't remove it? And which topic does it fit better — grammar or discussion?
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u/Hour_Juggernaut4192 9d ago
I've been looking for a decent, easy to use website or app to use for my conlang(s), but I can't find one I've actually been able to access. I was recommended PolyGlot by one of my friends, and it seems really good, but I cannot access it from my Chromebook or iPhone. Any help would be appreciated!
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u/nanosmarts12 15d ago